Anyone following the debate over the “repeal and replace” of the Affordable Care Act knows the 13 Republican senators writing the bill are meeting behind closed doors.

While Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) continues to push for a vote before the July 4 Senate recess, Washington’s favorite parlor game has become guessing what is, or will be, in the Senate bill.

Spoiler: No one knows what the final Senate bill will look like — not even those writing it.

“It’s an iterative process,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R.-Texas) told Politico, adding that senators in the room are sending options to the Congressional Budget Office to try to figure out in general how much they would cost. Those conversations between senators and the CBO — common for lawmakers working on major, complex pieces of legislation — sometimes prompt members to press through and other times to change course.).

Although specifics, to the extent there are any, have largely stayed secret, some of the policies under consideration have slipped out, and pressure points of the debate are fairly clear. Anything can happen, but here’s what we know so far:

1. Medicaid expansion

The Republicans are determined to roll back the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. The question is, how to do it. The ACA called for an expansion of the Medicaid program for those with low incomes to everyone who earns less than 133 percent of poverty (around $16,000 a year for an individual), with the federal government footing much of the bill. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the expansion was optional for states, but 31 have done so, providing new coverage to an estimated 14 million people.

The Republican bill passed by the House on May 4 would phase out the federal funding for those made eligible by the ACA over two years, beginning in 2020. But Republican moderates in the Senate want a much slower end to the additional federal aid. Several have suggested that they could accept a seven-year phaseout.

Keeping the federal expansion money flowing that long, however, would cut into the bill’s budget savings. That matters: In order to protect the Senate’s ability to pass the bill under budget rules that require only a simple majority rather than 60 votes, the bill’s savings must at least match those of the House version. Any extra money spent on Medicaid expansion would have to be cut elsewhere.

The House bill would, for the first time, cap the amount the federal government provides to states for their Medicaid programs. The CBO estimated that the caps would put more of the financial burden for the program on states, who would respond by a combination of cutting payments to health care providers like doctors and hospitals, eliminating benefits for patients and restricting eligibility.

The Medicaid cap may or may not be included in the Senate bill, depending on whom you ask. However, sources with direct knowledge of the negotiations say the real sticking point is not whether or not to impose a cap — they want to do that. The hurdles: how to be fair to states that get less federal money and how fast the caps should rise.

Again, if the Senate proposal is more generous than the House’s version, it will be harder to meet the bill’s required budget targets.

3. Restrictions on abortion coverage and Planned Parenthood

The senators are actively considering two measures that would limit funding for abortions, though it is not clear if either would be allowed to remain in the bill according to the Senate’s rules. The Senate Parliamentarian, who must review the bill after the senators complete it but before it comes to the floor, will decide.

The House-passed bill would ban the use of federal tax credits to purchase private coverage that includes abortion as a benefit. This is a key demand for a large portion of the Republican base. But the Senate version of the bill must abide by strict rules that limit its content to provisions that directly impact the federal budget. In the past, abortion language in budget bills has been ruled out of order.

4. Reading between the lines

A related issue is whether House language to temporarily bar Planned Parenthood from participating in the Medicaid program will be allowed in the Senate.

While the Parliamentarian allowed identical language defunding Planned Parenthood to remain in a similar budget bill in 2015, it was not clear at the time that Planned Parenthood would have been the only provider affected by the language. Planned Parenthood backers say they will argue to the Parliamentarian that the budget impact of the language is “merely incidental” to the policy aim and therefore should not be allowed in the Senate bill.

5. Insurance market reforms

Senators are also struggling with provisions of the House-passed bill that would allow states to waive certain insurance requirements in the Affordable Care Act, including those laying out “essential” benefits that policies must cover, and those banning insurers from charging sicker people higher premiums. That language, as well as an amendment seeking to ensure more funding to help people with preexisting conditions, was instrumental in gaining enough votes for the bill to pass the House.

Eliminating insurance regulations imposed by the ACA are a top priority for conservatives. “Conservatives would like to clear the books of Obamacare’s most costly regulations and free the states to regulate their markets how they wish,” wrote Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who is one of the 13 senators negotiating the details of the bill, in an op-ed in May.

However, budget experts suggest that none of the insurance market provisions is likely to clear the Parliamentarian hurdle as being primarily budget-related.

Politically, Senators Rob Portman (R.-Ohio) and Mark Warner (D.-Va.) are not all that far apart. Both are moderates who rejected proposed cuts in Medicaid funds. And yet, in the highly polarized atmosphere of Washington, D.C., they find themselves rallying constituents along diametrically opposed positions.

The dialogue has become President Obama’s Affordable Care Act versus a new GOP bill, called (for now) the American Health Care Act. A love-it-or-leave-it mentality pervades both sides. As angry voters at town halls express their concerns about the state of American healthcare, the senators are reaching out for patient stories to prove their respective viewpoints.

“Let Me Know Your Obamacare Story” Portman’s Web site asks and — from the introduction — he’s in search of a particular narrative.

“President Obama’s big government healthcare bill was supposed to bend the cost curve down,” Portman’s message reads. Instead, it goes on, the average Ohioan with a healthcare plan obtained through Obamacare pays “nearly an extra $100 a month” in premiums.

“That’s money that could be going toward retirement, groceries, and their children’s higher education; instead it’s going to cover President Obama’s costly mandates,” the Web site asserts.

Portman could play a particularly pivotal role in shaping the Senate’s health bill because he is a member of the 13-member working group that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R.-Ky.) tasked with writing the first draft.

Warner is in search of a different kind of tale. “Share Your ACA Success Story,” a solicitation that’s been on his Web site since late February, just weeks after the GOP took control of the House and made repealing Obamacare a top priority.

“Help me make the case against repealing the Affordable Care Act,” it states. “Since its enactment, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has helped millions of Americans gain comprehensive health coverage to protect themselves from life’s many unexpected events.” It cites lower rates of uninsured Virginians.

Portman and Warner are operating in different realities. In Portman’s world, Obamacare has failed; in Warner’s, it’s a huge success. “On particularly high-profile issues like this, the parties are coming from different places and speaking to predominantly different constituencies,” said Elizabeth Rigby, an associate professor of public administration and public policy at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. “The idea [that] Rob Portman begins with his assumption and Warner goes to his is actually a pretty understandable dynamic in our current polarized climate.”

Neither senator’s office responded to KHN’s requests for comment.

There is no mystery about human stories’ effectiveness in shaping opinions and helping win debates.

“The stories will usually paint the picture of situations that the audience can empathize with, or see themselves in, or that someone they know has experienced,” said Paul Achter, who chairs the rhetoric and communication studies department at the University of Richmond, in Virginia.

One famous example occurred in the early 1990s when health insurers created a memorable advertising campaign about a fictional couple named “Harry and Louise,”whose griping about their medical bills helped sink the Clinton administration’s healthcare overhaul. In 2009, the couple returned in a new campaign sponsored by drugmakers and a health-care advocacy group to support President Obama’s healthcare plan.

But the notion that the “real” patient stories featured in debates and advertisements reflect constituents’ reality is highly questionable. One Portman constituent, Sarah, complained that she’d sent the senator an email telling him she was dissatisfied with Betsy DeVos’s nomination to be Education secretary, only to receive “robo email” asking if she had any stories of bad experiences with Obamacare.

“I almost lost my mind,” she said. An ovarian-cancer survivor, Sarah responded to Portman’s email solicitation saying she was grateful for the Affordable Care Act because she no longer worried about her preexisting condition.

“I know you were hoping for an ‘I hate Obamacare’ story, but you won’t get that from me,” she wrote.

Both senators have effectively weaponized their constituents’ stories on the Senate floor. In January, Portman harnessed the power of personal experiences to illustrate problems that he said his constituents have had with the health law.

“There’s a family of five that wrote to me after the cost of his family’s insurance doubled. Another man saw his $100 deductible soar to $4,000 while his premium hit $1,000 a month,” Portman said. “Again, these folks just can’t afford it.”

Warner played the same card in a February speech opposing Tom Price’s nomination as secretary of Health and Human Services. He spoke of an organic farmer in his state who had relied on an Obamacare plan to get healthcare for her family.

But in a highly divided electorate — Americans were evenly split over the law in April, with 46 percent reporting that they supported it and 46 percent saying that they didn’t — such heartwarming stories may be pushing people apart, rather than pulling them together.

Governing magazine looks at how six states –Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Maine and Wisconsin — plan to revamp their Medicaid programs in the Trump era. The article says:

“While the Republican-controlled Congress is trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), governors on both sides of the aisle are anxiously awaiting to see what happens. In the meantime, some are trying to make their own changes to the health-care system in their state — and have the best chance of doing so in years.

“To customize their Medicaid programs, states have been able to ask the federal government for waivers for decades. The Obama administration rejected many waivers, concluding that they were unconstitutional or would drastically limit poor people’s ability to afford health insurance. For example, many states sought to make employment a requirement for Medicaid, but the Obama administration declined every such request.

“With Donald Trump in the White House and Tom Price leading the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department, conservative states will likely see their long-denied wishes come true. Both officials support giving states more flexibility than the Obama administration, and a final bill to replace the ACA would likely increase states’ power as well. So in the early days of the Trump administration, some governors enthusiastically submitted waivers.”

“If some of these proposals get the greenlight as expected, they could drastically change the structure of Medicaid in their states and have national implications.”

The Republican overhaul of the federal health law passed by the U.S. House this month would result in slightly lower average premiums and slightly fewer uninsured Americans than an earlier proposal. But it would leave as many as one-sixth of Americans living in states where older and sicker people might have to pay much more for their health care or be unable to purchase insurance at all, the Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

In some states, said the report, “less healthy people would face extremely high premiums, despite the additional funding that would be available” in the bill to help offset those increases.

The report incorporates the changes to the bill made just before it narrowly passed the House on May 4. Those changes included an amendment offered by Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) that would let states waive some key provisions of the health law, including requirements to cover “essential health benefits” and to offer insurance to people with preexisting conditions at no extra cost.

CBO said the current version would result in savings of $119 billion over 10 years and 23 million more uninsured people than would be expected under the current law.

According to the estimate, premiums would be slightly lower than under the Affordable Care Act, but mostly because “the insurance, on average, would pay for a smaller proportion of health care costs.”

Before the changes, the CBO estimated that the bill would result in savings of $150 billion over the next decade and grow the number of uninsured Americans by 24 million. That dollar figure was a considerable change from the original version of the bill that CBO said would have saved $337 billion, but lawmakers decided to spend back some of those savings on help for those likely to be cut off from insurance.

The two earliest versions of the bill could not muster enough support for the House leadership to bring them to a vote on the floor. Later, MacArthur and leaders of the conservative Freedom Caucus negotiated changes that they said should help bring down premium costs for consumers. That is the bill approved and now evaluated by CBO.

The CBO also estimated that in states deciding to take the option to waive requirements related to charging sicker people more, “the nongroup market would start to become unstable.” In particular, said the report, “people who are less healthy (including those with pre-existing or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all.”

And in states that chose to waive the requirements for essential benefits, even people with insurance “would experience substantial increases in what they would spend on health care,” because their policies might no longer cover expensive treatments like those for maternity care or mental health and substance abuse.

Despite repeated assertions by President Trump and congressional Republicans that the Affordable Care Act is collapsing, the CBO specifically said that the market would continue “to be stable in most areas” under current law. It predicted the same for the original version of the House bill.

In fact, the only place the CBO specifically said the individual insurance market might become unstable is in states that decide to waive the ACA’s coverage requirements. It did not guess which states might do that, but the report says that one-sixth of the population could be subject to that instability.

“What is clear is that these waivers make life much, much worse for people with preexisting conditions, for older people, for sicker people,” said Aviva Aron-Dine, a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and former Obama administration health staffer.

The savings in the bill are mostly the result of capping federal funding to states for the Medicaid program for those with low incomes and scaling back the tax credits that help some people with low and modest incomes pay for private insurance. An estimated 14 million of the 23 million people who would no longer have insurance would otherwise have obtained it through Medicaid.

The bill would also repeal nearly all the taxes imposed in the ACA to pay for the new benefits, including taxes on wealthy individuals and much of the health industry.

Reaction to the new estimate fell mostly along predictable party lines.

“CBO continues to find that through our patient-focused bill, premiums will go down and that our reforms will help stabilize the market,” said a statement from House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden (R.-Ore.) and its health subcommittee chairman, Michael Burgess (R.-Texas).

By contrast, Rep. Steny Hoyer (D.-Md.) said the new estimate shows “TrumpCare will kick millions of Americans off their insurance coverage and force consumers to pay more for less.”

But the reaction was not completely partisan. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), a key swing vote in the Senate, said that “Congress’s focus must be to lower premiums with coverage which passes the Jimmy Kimmel test,” referring to the late-night host’s tearful monologue about the health problems of his newborn son. The House-passed bill, he said, “does not. I am working with Senate colleagues to do so.”

Before he was diagnosed with head and neck cancer in 2015, Anthony Kinsey often went without health insurance. He is a contract lawyer working for staffing agencies on short-term projects in the Washington, D.C., area, and sometimes the 90-day waiting period for coverage through a staffing agency proved longer than the duration of his project, if coverage was offered at all.

When Kinsey, now 57, learned he had cancer, he was able to sign up for a plan with a $629 monthly premium because the agency he was working for offered group coverage that became effective almost immediately. The plan covered the $62,000 surgery to cut out the diseased bone and tissue on the left side of his face, as well as chemotherapy and radiation. His share of the treatment cost was $1,800.

If the American Health Care Act, which the House recently passed, becomes law, people like Kinsey who have health problems might not fare so well trying to buy insurance after a lapses.

The Republican bill would still require insurers to offer coverage to everyone, including people who have preexisting medical conditions, such as diabetes, asthma or even cancer. But it would allow states to opt out of the federal health law’s prohibition against charging sick people more than healthy ones. In those states, if people have a break in coverage of more than 63 days, insurers could charge them any price for coverage for approximately a year, effectively putting coverage out of reach for many sick people, analysts say. After a year, they would be charged a regular rate again.

Coming up with a figure for how many people have preexisting conditions that could put them at risk for facing unaffordable health insurance premiums has been the subject of debate, with estimates ranging from 133 million on the high end to 2 million on the low end.

What we know is that before the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, insurers in the individual market frequently charged people more if they were sick. According to a 2009 survey of individual market insurers by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group, 34 percent of coverage was offered at higher-than-standard rates, while 6 percent of those offers included waivers that excluded coverage for specific conditions.

But some health-policy analysts suggest that it’s not only people who have a gap in coverage who could be affected if a state seeks the health law waiver. There could be consequences for anyone with a preexisting condition, even those who have maintained continuous insurance coverage. That’s because the bill opens the door for insurers to set rates for people based on their health. For example, those without a health condition could be offered discounted premiums.

“If you have a preexisting condition, you’re going to be put into the block of business with the sicker risk pool,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

Requiring people to maintain continuous coverage is the Republicans’ preferred alternative to Obamacare’s individual mandate that requires people to have insurance or pay a fine. But there are many reasons people may have a gap in coverage, especially if they’re sick, say consumer advocates.

“If they’re diagnosed with cancer and going through a grueling treatment, they might move closer to their caregiver or the cancer center,” said Kirsten Sloan, vice president for policy at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. “They may quit their job for that reason, or they may lose their job.”

Once people have a gap in coverage they may really be in a bind if the available coverage is unaffordable. To address this, the Republican bill requires states to set up a high-risk pool or reinsurance program or participate in a federal risk-sharing program.

State high-risk pools, which were available in 35 states before the ACA passed, have been widely criticized, however, as inadequate for people with expensive health care needs. Premiums were often extremely high, and there were frequently lifetime or annual limits on coverage. Some plans excluded coverage for as long as a year for the very conditions people needed insurance.

Still, Thomas Miller, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says high-risk pools offer a reasonable solution for the 2 million to 4 million people in the individual market he estimates have preexisting conditions but would otherwise be medically uninsurable or offered such high-cost coverage that they couldn’t afford it. The $130 billion over nine years that the bill sets aside to use for high-risk pools or other individual market activities, along with an additional $8 billion over five years for states that get waivers from ACA community-rating requirements, “could be adequate” to meet the need, he said.

Besides, he argued, the higher rates would last for only a year.

“Once you’ve paid up, you graduate back to the regular market,” Miller said. “It’s not like being sentenced to the Gulag.”

Kinsey said he plans to keep his coverage up to date from now on, but he doesn’t think it’s fair to charge sick people higher rates even if they have a break in coverage.

Harken Health is ending its unusual combination of health insurance and clinic care in Illinois and Georgia.

The insurer began selling insurance plans for customers at its clinics in Illinois and Georgia in 2015. A subsidiary of gigantic UnitedHealthcare, Harken offered its members unlimited free physician visits at its health centers, as well as such wellness programs as acupuncture, yoga and meditation.

The move follows a decision last September to pull out of those states’ Affordable Care Act exchanges for 2017. Harken also canceled plans to expand into southern Florida.

Despite (mostly Republican) assertions about “death spirals” of state insurance exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act, the biggest such exchange, Covered California, seems to be doing well in at least one important some way.

The authors of an article in Health Affairs report:

“The most recent open enrollment period for 2017 suggests that Covered California continues to maintain a risk mix of healthy and less healthy individuals that is similar to prior years and, thus, remains stable and strong.”

“More broadly, the statewide ‘raw’ risk score declined from 1.11 in 2016 down to 1.09 in 2017, indicating that the 2017 enrollee population is slightly healthier with respect to chronic conditions than their 2016 counterparts. Combined, these results reveal encouraging news, for amid talk of death spirals, it suggests Covered California continues to attract a healthy mix of enrollees.”

Aetna will complete its withdrawal from Affordable Care Act state insurance exchanges in 2018. The huge insurer, which overall is very profitable, said that continuing financial losses in the exchanges and uncertainty about the marketplaces’ future led it to decide to leave the last two states — Delaware and Nebraska — in which it has been on ACA exchanges. Just last week it said that it would stop offering ACA health plans in Virginia in 2018 and last month it said it would leave Iowa.

Aetna Chief Executive Mark Bertolini has said that the ACA marketplaces were in a “death spiral,” which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said isn’t true.

The exchanges have been undermined by the fierce opposition to the Affordable Care Act of the Trump administration and Republican politicians in Red States.

Insurers, for their part, complain that their ACA plans attract too few of the young and healthy customers needed to offset the expense of covering older people, who, of course, tend to have more serious health problems than do younger people.

A major reason is that the financial penalties for people for not buying insurance are far too small.

For example, the penalty for not buying insurance for an adult is $625 per adult and $347.50 per child under 18. So a lot of younger healthy people decide to pay the fine, which is much cheaper than paying insurance premiums. And if they get sick or injured, they can go to a hospital ER, where all or some of the costs will be covered by the hospital, in the form of “charity care” and local, state and federal governments.

It’s all just another example of why the U.S. healthcare system is near the bottom in medical outcomes and at the top in costs in the Developed World. It’s immensely complicated and contradictory, fee-driven and fueled by the desire of many, perhaps most, clinicians and hospital and insurance executives for maximum personal profit.

Under the Republican health bill, it’s up to states whether to dismantle key parts of the Affordable Care Act.

Red, or GOP-leaning, states are sure to be interested in rolling back the law’s coverage requirements and freeing insurers to charge people more when they have preexisting conditions.

As strange as it sounds, deep-blue, heavily Democratic states supportive of Obamacare, including California and New York, may be forced to do the same, according to experts, regulators and consumer advocates.

The American Health Care Act, which narrowly passed the House on Thursday and now heads to the Senate, would significantly cut the federal subsidies on which many Americans rely to buy coverage. Unless the legislation fails or changes substantially, many consumers across the country could see the amount they pay every year for premiums increase by thousands of dollars, making coverage effectively unaffordable.

Few, if any, states would be able to fund subsidies on their own. To keep insurers in the market and bring costs down, state leaders might feel compelled to seek exemptions from rules that require health plans to provide 10 “essential health benefits” and prohibit them from charging higher rates for sicker consumers. The new GOP health care bill would allow such waivers.

“With the skimpier subsidies, states are going to be under enormous pressure to apply for these waivers,” said Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms.

These opt-out provisions could accelerate the unraveling of Obamacare, even in places that fully embraced the landmark law.

“Certainly the Californias and New Yorks of the world will do what they can to hold onto the ACA protections. But when confronted with insurer exits and big price hikes, many states with the best of intentions may feel they have little choice but to get a waiver,” Corlette said.

The idea of opting out is unfathomable to many liberals who fought so hard to win the consumer protections in the . They’re hoping that the Senate will dump the bill or, in its quest for more moderate votes, at least make the premium tax credits more generous or eliminate the waivers.

Republican leaders insist the current health law isn’t worth saving because it has left consumers with double-digit rate hikes, onerous deductibles and little or no competition in some states, as insurers exit the marketplaces.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R.-Texas), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said the GOP health bill grants states the flexibility they need to remove the “crushing mandates” that have led to “Obamacare plans you don’t want and can’t afford.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R.-Wis.) struck a similar note in urging his colleagues to pass the bill. “Let’s make it easier for people to afford their insurance. … Let’s return power from Washington to the states,” he said on the House floor Thursday.

Consumer advocates in North Carolina, Colorado and other states are taking the threat of waivers seriously.

“No state is safe from such a waiver,” said Brendan Riley, a health-policy analyst at the North Carolina Justice Center, an advocacy group focused on economic and social issues.

North Carolina would be one of the states hit hardest by the House bill, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The state’s average premiums and out-of-pocket costs would rise by $7,549 annually.

Nationally, the average tax credit for enrollees in the online marketplaces would be 41 percent lower under the American Health Care Act by 2022, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. (Kaiser Health News, which produces California Healthline, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

The GOP bill also ends the penalty for not having coverage, which experts say might increase premiums as fewer healthy people sign up, leaving health plans with a higher proportion of sick patients.

All this could put the focus back on which benefits are deemed essential in health insurance — an all-too-familiar battle in statehouses before the ACA set a nationwide standard.

The health law now requires all plans sold on the individual and small-group markets to cover the 10 essential health benefits, including hospitalization, prescription drugs and mental-health treatment. It has made coverage more comprehensive and prevented insurers from selling bare-bones plans that had cheaper premiums but often exposed consumers to huge medical bills after they sought care.

Before the ACA, coverage for maternity care, prescription drugs and substance abuse treatment often wasn’t available. State lawmakers were hesitant to approve new benefit mandates for fear of raising premiums.

Washington state Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler, a Democrat, said he sees a political fight over benefits on the horizon if the GOP bill advances.

“I certainly think there’s going to be political pressure applied to make adjustments [in essential health benefits],” he said. “I’d be vociferously and violently opposed to those changes.”

Adela Flores-Brennan, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, said she too has faith that her state’s Democratic governor and insurance commissioner would uphold essential benefits and protections for people with preexisting conditions.

But she and other patient advocates said that resolve may be tested by the lack of competition in some areas, which insurers could use as a bargaining chip for more leeway on regulations.

For instance, Flores-Brennan noted that industry giant Anthem is the sole company on the state’s insurance exchange in 14 Colorado counties. She said she worries the company could threaten to pull out if the state doesn’t opt for weaker standards.

Even in California, a liberal bastion that enthusiastically implemented Obamacare, the law’s supporters are bracing for a fight over the waivers.

“As premiums go higher, it will create pressure on us to undercut the standards we have,” said Beth Capell, a lobbyist for the consumer advocacy group Health Access California.

In California, premiums and out-of-pocket costs would rise by $2,779, on average, under the House bill, according to the analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

“California policymakers will once again hear what we heard year after year before the ACA: ‘Some coverage is better than no coverage. More limited benefits are better than nothing,’” Capell said.

John Baackes, the chief executive of L.A. Care Health Plan, with about 26,000 enrollees in the California exchange, said state leaders would exhaust every other option before slashing coverage.

“California would be loath to cut benefits,” Baackes said. “If you’re selling a policy to a young adult without maternity care, that’s nuts.”

No matter the state, red or blue, experts anticipate vigorous debate over these waivers because consumer protections under Obamacare have become more popular.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, experienced that firsthand last week when he suggested his state may opt out of the ACA’s preexisting condition rules — and then immediately backtracked amid strong opposition.

Michael Miller, director of strategic policy for Community Catalyst, a Boston-based national consumer group, said waiver requests won’t necessarily proceed “quietly even in the red states. … People have heart disease and cancer and asthma in those states, too.”

The AARP called the health-insurance bill that House Republicans narrowly approved May 4 “deeply flawed” because it would weaken Medicare and lead to higher insurance premiums for older Americans.

The American Medical Association said it would undo health insurance coverage gains and hurt public health efforts to fight disease. The American Hospital Association said the bill would destroy Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program for the poor that expanded mightily under the Affordable Care Act and buoyed hospitals’ bottom lines.

Normally, that would spell failure.

But in today’s Washington, despite vocal opposition from nearly every major constituency affected by the bill, the vote produced the opposite result. The chorus of nays was not enough to stop the Republican-controlled House from approving the American Health Care Act, which repeals many critical parts of Affordable Care Act — the 2010 law known as Obamacare that has dropped uninsured rates in the United States to historic lows but, despite its lofty name, did little to rein in rising health costs. The AHCA will now move to the Senate, where GOP senators are expected to demand many changes.

Republicans have promised to repeal Obamacare since the day it was passed with only Democrats voting for it and have been campaigning on that promise ever since. While the House voted to repeal the act more than 60 times under the Obama administration, the May 4 vote was the first one that really counted because the GOP controls Congress and the White House.

Peter Kongstvedt, a Virginia health-industry consultant, said some House Republicans are likely betting the Senate blocks their legislation from going forward. “Nobody wins with this vote — that’s the damnedest part,” he said. “It’s a shallow political statement.”

The vote was about healthcare, but it was a display of political theater, too. Representatives sent a message not to hospitals, doctors and patients but to President Trump and his devoted followers who propelled the GOP to power.

“The president needed a win and so does House Speaker Paul Ryan,” said Jason Fichtner, a healthcare expert at the conservative Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va. “With this vote, they can go back to their constituents and say they did something about Obamacare.”

That is, the 217 GOP House members who voted for the bill. Twenty voted no, joining 193 Democrats.

Trump’s team scored him a touchdown, but their run to the goal line wasn’t politically pretty:

The bill passed without an updated analysis of costs and benefits from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, whose review in March came before the GOP added sweeteners to win over its conservatives and moderates.

Democrats passed Obamacare after a year of debate. The GOP spent only two months hammering out its replacement plan.

Business groups — such as the drug and hospital industries — played no part in shaping the AHCA. The Obama administration got both groups on board early on.

The GOP’s focus was not so much on what can lower prices and increase health coverage but how to persuade the right-wing Freedom Caucus to back the legislation.

In the end, passage mattered less about how the bill played in public polls — poorly — or among key interest groups — nearly all opposed. “Coming to agreement and avoiding the embarrassment of not coming to agreement was more important than what was in the final bill,” said Jim Morone, a political scientist at Brown University in Rhode Island. “Republicans have become a deeply ideological party … and they don’t care what interest groups think; they are going to press ahead.”

Part of the unlikely victory is that the bill makes the biggest change to Medicaid since the program was established in 1965 and there hasn’t been as much debate about that as one might expect. The AHCA could lead to huge cuts in federal funding of Medicaid, which now covers more than 75 million Americans.

Alan Levine, a hospital executive who was the top health official under former Republican governors Jeb Bush in Florida and Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, said Republicans who ran on repealing Obamacare felt that they had no choice but to vote for the bill, despite its flaws. “I don’t think Republicans can face voters in 2018 and have a credible argument to keep them in control of Congress, if they did not do their No. 1 campaign priority to repeal Obamacare,” said Levine, CEO of Mountain States Health Alliance, a hospital system based in Johnson City, Tenn.

Besides, he said, even if the GOP bill becomes law, it’s set up so that the changes won’t affect many people before the 2018 midterm elections. “People won’t feel this — good or bad — until well after the election.”